Survival Machine, Grape Pickers’ debut game, is out now in early access, adding a bit more charm, colour and a giant machine to your usual zombie survival experience. But, although it prides itself on its lighter take on the genre, it does create some frustrations due to its simple nature.
When you first enter Survival Machine, you’re dropped straight into a house and immediately asked to leave; A basic tutorial follows, through which you make your way to the giant machine you’ll now call home. It teaches you the basics about crafting as well as some of the survival techniques — such as food and stamina management — and then the grind begins.
Your first priority is securing wood for the machine so that it can run. It cannot function, produce items or move if it does not have fuel — such as wood, or other materials — to keep its internal furnace burning. It does also move at a snail’s pace, so you will need a lot of these resources if you plan on getting anywhere.
Most of Survival Machine is based on acquiring resources found in the world around you, wood, food, metals, materials to help build up your base and kit yourself out with the best gear, however, if you’re like me and like to have a look around instead of diving straight into the objectives then you’ll have a rough start.
It encourages you to find specific upgrades and follow a set path to progression, which, for some, is extremely handy, but I like to try and find a good portion of these naturally and what I didn’t realise is that a number of these unlocks that are crucial to progression are linked to doing these missions and you will struggle to progress without following them to the letter.
Resources are the name of the game and gathering any in the early game can be a real slog, not to mention that there’s no clear way to upgrade your tools in the beginning — meaning that when you do stumble across something new, like a new ore, you can either attempt to remember where it is or just accept it’s gone and loop back around for it in the future.
Once you’ve spent the day gathering as much as you can you occasionally need to defend your new mechanical homeland from the many zombies that set out to destroy it. A few rounds of wave based defence will begin with the driver of the machine announcing to you in the morning.
You will want to build up your defences using mounted weapons, traps, structures and more, to defend your home, however, the more useful upgrades can be pretty expensive. This led to us being a bit more frugal when placing defences down. I didn’t actually end up building any actual structures myself because I found it more useful to save my materials for the things I needed, rather than walls and the like.
The zombies found in the world are pretty basic with only a handful of different ones, but when they swarm you they can really beat you down if you’re not careful. A combination of decent health in the early game and each being able to take a swing at you in a short time can lead to your health hitting zero quicker than you can react if you’re not paying attention.
Each zombie does, however, have a pretty funny name which are generally puns, giving the sense that this is meant to be a laid back game. There isn’t a real sense of threat in the world beyond these, which makes it quite easy to explore and relatively simple to navigate, but, because of this it can start to feel tedious to simply have to scrounge for resources over and over.
The night-based waves’ only real changes include having more zombies attack and adding the few other zombie types. So, after about your third night of attacks, it’s purely a numbers game. This also ends up leaving you in a bad spot if you do not progress quick enough, because your basic weapons can struggle with dealing the damage required to clear large amounts of enemies.
There are a number of things that could be done to improve the balance, and, as I’m writing this, a new patch has just landed. The patch lets you control a number of factors, such as how often the night based waves spawn, or whether your item’s durability changes when being used. It’s really positive how quickly the developers are addressing balance concerns, and these fixes — especially — allow for a much more tailored experience if you’re struggling..
One thing that would be extremely handy here would be a map. You can find a sonar on the machine itself built in but you can only use it to drop flares in locations to guide you roughly towards an area. With Survival Machine‘s verticality, it can be frustrating to find things not knowing if they’re deep underground or towering atop a cliff.
Overall, I think Survival Machine is a great co-op experience with friends., I do think that if you have perhaps some younger kids, or people that are not too versed in the world of survival crafting games then this could be a great stepping point to give them a go. But, for the more seasoned veterans, it may be worth giving it a miss as there just won’t be enough to keep them hooked.. It is still in Steam Early Access however, and I imagine the devs have a lot more in mind.
Survival Machine is available now, for PC, on Steam Early Access.
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